After divesting himself of his clothes and placing them in as safe a place as possible, the athlete next proceeded to anoint himself with oil and carefully rub the oil into the skin. He might do so himself or obtain the services of an attendant, the aleiptes. The terms aleiptes and paidotribes indicate the importance which the Greeks attached to the oiling and massaging of the body both before and after exercise. These processes were afterwards developed into elaborate arts, and special rooms were set apart for them, but in the fifth century they were comparatively simple and took place either in the apodyterion or else in the open air.[[813]] The oil was contained in little narrow necked flasks of various shapes, lekythoi, aryballoi, alabastra. Each person probably brought his own flask of oil and his strigil. At times of festival oil was supplied free to all competitors, and in later times gymnasiarchoi and other high officials showed their generosity by providing at their own expense the oil required for the epheboi using the gymnasia. A krater in Berlin (Fig. [176]) shows a group of epheboi undressing and preparing for exercise. One of them has just taken off his himation and folded it up and is about to hand it to a slave-boy, either his own slave or one attached to the gymnasium. Another has laid his himation on a stool, and is pouring some oil from an aryballos into his left hand. To his left stands a third ephebos resting on his stick, with his mantle thrown loosely across his shoulders, while a small slave removes a thorn from his foot. The other side of the vase illustrates the curious custom of infibulation. Massaging is, as far as I know, not depicted on any vases; but a drawing of an aleiptes rubbing down a boxer occurs on a bronze cist in the Vatican[[814]] (Fig. [177]).
Fig. 176. R.-f. krater. Berlin, 2180.
Fig. 177. Bronze cista. Vatican.
Fig. 178. R.-f. amphora. St. Petersburg, Hermitage, 1611.
It may have been in the Apodyterion, or else in some other corner of the gymnasium, that the korykos (κώρυκος) was fixed up. In later times a special room was provided for the korykos, but its use at this time is proved by the caricature of a pankratiast using it which occurs on a vase in St. Petersburg (Fig. [178]). The korykos was a sort of punchball, a leathern bag or skin filled with fig grains, meal, or sand, and suspended from the branch of a tree or a beam. It varied in size. The larger sort which was used by pankratiasts was about the size of a sack of coals, and was hung so that the bottom of it was on a level with the athlete’s waist. The boxer used a smaller korykos about the size of a punchball hung on a level with his head, to judge from the picture of it on the Ficoroni cist, a work of the third century B.C. (Fig. [179]).[[815]] In the later gymnasia a special room was set apart for ball-play; but popular as ball games always were they seem to have been of little or no importance in the gymnasia of the fifth century.
Fig. 179. Ficoroni cista. Kirchner Museum, Rome. Third century B.C.